Why the Emmy Winners Are So Hard to Predict

Unlike the Oscars, which usually rally behind a handful of films, the Emmys are unwieldy, making it hard to predict winners.

Photo Illustration by Max-O-Matic.

Predicting the Emmys is a far tougher proposition than predicting the Oscars. Yes, because there are so many categories, but also because the Television Academy has a different set of decisions before it. Voters get second chances to consider a series or a performance, so they can change course from year to year or stick with a favorite to the bitter end. The trouble for us on the outside is that it’s not always clear when the wind is going to blow in a new direction. This year, there’s at least some indication that change might be afoot.

For the first time since its 2009 premiere, ABC’s Modern Family was not nominated for outstanding comedy series, marking the end of a hegemonic era that saw the show win five years in a row, with multiple other awards going to its ensemble cast. With that series out of the way, and current reigning champ Veep (HBO) taking the year off, the comedy-series category feels a bit looser, more susceptible to surprises. Could FX’s Atlanta, already honored at the Golden Globes in 2017, manage a win? That seems most likely, given the rapturously received second season and the banner year its creator and star, Donald Glover, has had. There’s also a lot of love for Netflix’s GLOW, about female wrestlers claiming power in a male-dominated space. Amazon’s The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel has a throwback appeal while also telling a progressive empowerment story. But Atlanta, with its mix of humor and artistry, feels like the comedy for the moment, trenchantly observant and unafraid to confront the pathos that has descended on so much American life in the last two years.

Perhaps the national mood will affect the outstanding-drama-series category in the opposite way. That list of nominees is a bit more business-as-usual, from which it’s hard to identify any one show as standing out from the pack. HBO’s Game of Thrones, with 22 nominations, once again has the most of any series, so maybe it wins by sheer numbers, but the season that’s being honored is almost a year old at this point—will voters remember it? More fresh in viewers’ minds could be FX’s lauded Cold War spy series, The Americans, which has finally gotten some awards attention at the end of its life (perhaps thanks to its eerie relevance to Trump’s bizarre bromance with Vladimir Putin). Voters might want to give the show, which concluded its critically beatified run this spring, a proper send-off. Though, just as likely is that Academy members, fatigued from the ills of America, will turn to Westeros for a grim kind of solace—or to midcentury England, where the second season of Netflix’s The Crown unfolded. I’m giving the edge at the moment to the House of Windsor, because we just had an American marry into the family and our royals obsession is at a fever pitch once again.

Some might point to Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale as the front-runner; it was the first-ever streaming show to nab an outstanding-drama-series Emmy when it won last year. But the second season has been unrelentingly bleak and brutal, and, anecdotally, many onetime fans seem to think the show has lost its way. The TV Academy is famously slow to adapt, so perhaps the mild backlash won’t affect the show’s Emmy chances this year. But I think its prospects have cooled, and it’s likely destined to join the ranks of *Lost *and *Homeland *as a freshman success that does not repeat.

The show’s star, Elisabeth Moss, might have a better shot in the lead-drama-actress race. She is, after all, steeped in years’ worth of goodwill from her Mad Men days (not to mention Top of the Lake), and she won for The Handmaid’s Tale last year. A second win for her would be less surprising than the show taking home the top prize. She’s got stiff competition, though, from a new arrival. Sandra Oh, no stranger to Emmy nominations with five previous ones for Grey’s Anatomy, could win for her sterling lead performance on BBC America’s buzzy new series Killing Eve. Sexy, suspenseful, and defiantly strange, the show could prove a little alienating to stuffier voters. But as the first actress of Asian descent nominated in the lead category, Oh not only has a captivating performance working for her but also history-making momentum.

The end of The Americans might be reason enough for voters to throw in for its celebrated star Keri Russell, who grew up in the TV industry and found a grown-up second act as a fiercely determined Russian spy. I see this as Oh’s year, but Russell could be chosen as an emblematic win, representing the entire under-awarded series just as it disappears forever.

This is all, of course, merely psychological guesswork, putting myself inside an imaginary voter’s mind. At the Oscars, the pool of contenders is small enough that a clear narrative can actually form around a film, making it easier to suss out how an average Academy member (if such a person exists) may react. But TV is trickier—the narratives are without a clear limit and thus ever shifting. Which is why I prefer to predict the limited-series category, because it’s a one-off, for the most part. (Ahem, Big Little Lies Season Two.) Given its raft of nominations, and the view of many in the industry that its producer Ryan Murphy is a savior of television, I’d have to imagine that FX’s The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story is at the head of the limited-series race. The nine-episode run scored six acting nods as well, a good indicator that support for the show is deep.

I had assumed that Hulu’s well-regarded 9/11 series, The Looming Tower, with its pedigreed cast of rumpled actors, would be the toughest competition for Versace, but Looming Tower didn’t get a limited-series nom. Instead, Versace is up against such relative lightweights as Genius: Picasso (National Geographic) and The Alienist (TNT), which could mean that Murphy’s American Crime Story anthology series will go two for two in limited-series Emmy wins after taking 2016’s prize for The People v. O.J. Simpson. After scrapping plans on a season involving Monica Lewinsky, and delays on a Hurricane Katrina installment, Murphy and company just have to find another famous crime for its next iteration. (NBC took the Menendez brothers with its Law & Order True Crime: The Menendez Murders, leading to an Emmy nom for its lead actress, Edie Falco.)

If there’s any sort of lock at the Emmys this year I’d have to imagine it would be Laura Dern for her lead role in HBO’s TV movie The Tale, a harrowing and unflinching memoir piece that took Sundance by storm when it premiered there in January. Dern is a force throughout, playing a slightly fictionalized version of filmmaker Jennifer Fox as she explores past sexual trauma. Though extraordinarily difficult to watch at times, The Tale has an undeniable urgency, one that Dern communicates with her trademark clarity and intensity. She seems likely to win her second consecutive Emmy after a supporting win last year for Big Little Lies. HBO really has been good to her—someone tell the cable channel’s new management not to screw that up.

Speaking of HBO, its second-flashiest show, Westworld, fared better than expected when it netted 21 nominations, including five acting nods and one for outstanding drama series. But will it win anything? The fate of HBO may rest partly on Westworld’s smooth robotic shoulders, and some awards traction would provide a good booster shot for its profile. The odds are probably best in the craft categories, but I’m holding out hope that Jeffrey Wright and Thandie Newton, both terrific in the second season, can somehow eke out, respectively, lead- and supporting-acting wins. But Wright is likely to lose to Sterling K. Brown for NBC’s This Is Us or even his own co-star, Ed Harris, while Newton has to face down the formidable Lena Headey, from* Game of Thrones,* and Alexis Bledel, who won a guest-star Emmy for The Handmaid’s Tale last year and has now been bumped up to supporting.

We’re all left to read the tea leaves heading into the Emmy Awards on September 17. The only thing we can say for absolute certain? The great Rita Moreno definitely isn’t going to win for her wonderful work on Netflix’s One Day at a Time. Because voters didn’t even have the decency to nominate her. But that’s a matter for another article altogether.